Island in a Sea of Stars by Kevin J. Anderson Page A

went to static again. Through the windowports, she could see the blast going on and on and on.
    Alarms rang through the cockpit, and her engines sputtered. Life support wavered into the red zones, but secondary systems stabilized the air and light. The chain reaction continued interminably, until the inferno climaxed and finally dwindled as the explosions spread to the diffuse outlying bloaters.
    Half-blinded, she tried to catch her breath, astonished to be alive.
    With only a few of her sensors still functioning, she searched through the dissipating energy cloud, frantic. Elisa couldn’t detect Garrison’s ship, not even any wreckage. But if his vessel had been in the heart of those detonating bloaters, it would have been vaporized. That meant Seth was dead!
    Anger warred with her grief. Garrison had ripped the boy away from her because he feared Sheol was too dangerous a place—and he’d brought their son out here to a cluster of unstable bombs in space. She felt sick inside.
    The glare from the clustered explosions dissipated. Her screens remained dark, most sensors non-functional, and she would have to determine how many other systems were damaged. It was going to take all of her resources just to limp back to civilization.
    She looked again at the portrait image of Seth she’d placed in the cockpit. She didn’t even understand what had happened, refused to believe it. She had just fired a small warning shot with low-powered jazers! She had never expected that reaction.
    Hundreds of the bloaters still drifted around her, as mysterious as before. And another question tugged at the back of her mind. What the hell are those things made of?

11
    LEE ISWANDER
    Tower Three was located in the most intense part of the thermal plume, and when the thick support struts approached the melting point, the tower’s legs began to bend and buckle. In a slow and inexorable plunge, the tall structure folded over and collapsed on top of the smelter barge that had docked to the base to take evacuees. The comm channel was a storm of screams.
    Iswander gasped, “I can’t fix this—there’s no way to fix this!” He wanted to call up the reports, prove that he had done everything prudent to provide a safe environment. This was going to look very bad for him.
    â€œHow many personnel are stationed on Sheol?” Rlinda demanded.
    He called up the data immediately. “Over two thousand—two thousand seventeen, I think.” Then he remembered that Elisa Reeves had gone off after her husband and son. “No, two thousand fourteen.”
    â€œToo many for the ships you have,” Robb said.
    Iswander couldn’t argue with that. “We have shielded facilities, heat-resistant smelter barges, bolt-holes in the towers. We did not foresee the need for a full and complete evacuation of personnel.”
    â€œLooks to me like that’s what we’re going to need,” Rlinda said.
    On Tower Two, the heat-armored compies kept working at the evac hatch, while the two large rescue ships circled, looking for a way to retrieve the stranded personnel. Through the magnification screens on his desk, Iswander saw one of the shielded robots spark and collapse, its exterior skeleton melting. It dropped away from the hatch and fell like an insect sprayed with poison. Another compy took its place, working at the same ruined controls.
    Half of the geothermal sensors positioned around the sites had already burned out. Through the confusing squawk of alarms, Iswander heard an even more urgent tone: on the warning screen, a spike in the readings indicated an intense heat column rising through the magma near Tower Two.
    â€œThere’s a new lava geyser forming!” He signaled to the Tower Two supervisor. “Prepare yourselves. There’s going to be—” He stopped, knowing there was no way the supervisor could prepare herself.
    Yes, this was going to look very bad for him.
    Molten